Karen Good Marable is an author, journalist, editor, educator and mentor from Prairie View, Texas, whose writings about hip hop culture helped define a generation. With a career spanning three decades, Karen’s byline has appeared in numerous magazines and journals including The New Yorker, Essence, Oxford American, Vibe, Rolling Stone and NPR. Her name has also graced many a masthead, such as Seventeen, Vibe, Honey, Ebony and InStyle. She’s also worked as a busser, a horoscope writer, and a book seller.

Karen’s essays and poetry have been published in several books and best-of collections including Black Joy and Resistance (Waheedpix); And It Don’t Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years (Faber & Faber); The Vibe History of Hip Hop (Three Rivers Press); and most recently Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic (Lookout Books). A true OG, Karen wrote the liner notes for Erykah Badu’s album Baduizm Live and traveled as the writer for Mary J. Blige’s first tour in South Africa. Karen also co-produced “To Mary, With Love,” an online, multimedia birthday party celebrating the queen’s 50th.

In 2016, twenty years after graduating from Howard University with a degree in Print Journalism, and a lifetimeof her mother’s suggestion, Karen obtained her MFA degree from The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, NY–and gave birth to a daughter. That December, Karen quietly left New York City–Brooklyn, specifically–her home of 25 years, and relocated to Atlanta, Georgia. Back to the South that raised her.

Karen’s first children’s picture book, Yaya and the Sea [Denene Millner Books/Simon & Schuster Kids] debuts March 2024. She is currently completing her memoir.